As The Oscars Approach, Hollywood Grapples With AI’s Growing Influence On Filmmaking

BY HOLLY WILLIS

PROFESSOR OF CINEMATIC ARTS,

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

I teach a course on AI and filmmaking at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and lately, rather than planning each session well in advance, I’ve been structuring the class the night before. I’ll browse platforms like X, Substack and YouTube, selecting the most provocative articles and video clips to present the following morning.

It’s a testament to how quickly artificial intelligence’s relationship to filmmaking is evolving: Each week brings new – often startling – developments.

The next morning in class, my students and I debate the ethics, aesthetics and the storytelling changes taking place in these collaborations with AI.

And we’re not alone: Throughout Hollywood, everyone – aspiring actors and filmmakers, stars, screenwriters and studio execs – seems to have a take on what’s coming next. But I think three trends in particular are going to be hot topics of conversation at this year’s Oscars parties.

Nothing uncanny about this clip

In February 2026, a 15-second AI-generated video clip of Tom Cruise battling Brad Pitt on a burned-out highway overpass went viral.

Depending on the viewer, the video elicited either admiration, outrage or existential hand-wringing.

Created by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson via a generative-AI tool called Seedance 2.0, the video marked yet another milestone in the propulsive growth of AI tools.

Seedance 2.0 – which was developed by ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok – is now one of the many AI tools available to create short-form video clips. But unlike most AI-generated videos, Pitt and Cruise don’t look creepy, uncanny or animated in the clip, which almost perfectly mimics live-action footage. The appearance of two A-list stars in a fairly realistic scene created by a relatively unknown director using stolen likenesses jolted the industry.

The backlash was swift. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that the video was generated from a dataset that most likely includes Disney’s copyrighted characters. The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, pointed to the video’s “blatant infringement” of the actors’ likenesses, as well as their voices.

“SAG-AFTRA stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by Bytedance’s new AI video model Seedance 2.0,” the guild wrote in a statement. This practice, the guild added, “undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood,” while disregarding “law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent.”

In class, after watching the video, we explored the ethics of using someone’s likeness without permission, the challenges facing actors who build careers based on their unique ability to embody characters, and what the future holds for our understanding of acting.

If filmmakers can prompt fake actors to deliver precise performances, where does that leave human actors?

In with the old

Since 2023, the skyline of the Las Vegas strip has been dominated by an illuminated orb called the Sphere: an entertainment complex featuring a 360-degree LED screen covering 160,000 square feet (14,864 square meters). The Sphere recently surpassed 2 million tickets sold for a reimagining of the classic 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”

The film, which premiered in August 2024, was shortened, its color was enhanced, and it was stretched to expand across the interior of the dome. AI was used to transfer the imagery from the film’s original, modest aspect ratio to the giant dome. This required generating new imagery around the edges of the original shots in what’s known as “AI outpainting.” The technology was also deployed to boost the original film’s resolution and to enhance certain scenes.

Some critics fretted that this fairly radical augmentation of the original classic would offend viewers. Instead, it has drawn them in droves to the Sphere, where they’ve been willing to shell out between US$100 and $200 per ticket.

Not bad for a movie about a girl from Kansas made in 1939.

Given the resounding success of “The Wizard of Oz,” experts expect producers to plumb the film archives for other potential hits and enhance them with AI before screening them in venues as varied as IMAX theaters and Cosm, another 360-degree dome with locations in Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta.

Or AI can simply be used to create material that was never completed for a historic film.

In fact, The New Yorker recently profiled AI media entrepreneur Edward Saatchi, who is working to recreate and reincorporate lost footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 feature “The Magnificent Ambersons.” While Welles was in Brazil shooting a documentary, executives at RKO Radio Pictures reedited the film without his approval after a poor preview screening. They cut around 45 minutes, replaced the original ending with a happier one and destroyed most of the footage that had been removed.

Saatchi’s idea is to build a dataset that includes the existing film, as well as scripts, notes, images and even new performances by actors. Then he plans to use his AI platform, Showrunner, to create new scenes from this data.

While Saatchi hopes to honor the director’s creative vision by producing the film he originally intended, his efforts open up some thorny questions.

Is it appropriate to take an existing artwork and revise it without the creator’s input? Isn’t there something sacrosanct about a film, the intentions of the director and the performances of the actors in a film’s original form? To what extent should these questions be overlooked if refashioning old movies will introduce them to new audiences?

Fewer opportunities?

There’s also an undercurrent of anxiety in my classes. What will happen, my students often wonder, once they graduate?

They’re worried that within a year or two, AI will have replaced entry-level film industry jobs, from concept artists to apprentice-level editors, before they’ve even had a chance to enter the workforce.

They have reason to fear.

In 2024, the Animation Guild published a sobering report claiming that by 2026, “creative workers will be facing an era of disruption, defined by the consolidation of some job roles, the replacement of existing job roles with new ones, and the elimination of many jobs entirely.”

Some of those predictions have borne out: 41,000 jobs in film and television have disappeared in Los Angeles County alone over the past three years.

But I’ve tried to counter the hard statistics with some stories of thoughtful practices.

For example, filmmaker Paul Trillo at the AI studio Asteria has talked about how he seeks to keep artists at the center of the process. When he detailed the company’s work on a music video for the singer-songwriter Cuco, he was keen to highlight the number of artists working on the project. Yes, AI tools were used. But they were integrated in a way that replaced the tedious work, not the creative practice.

“Rather than removing [artists] from the process, it actually allowed them to do a lot more so a small team can dream a lot bigger,” Trillo explains at the end of the video.

In January 2026, the management consulting firm McKinsey published a report that largely echoes Trillo’s positive outlook. It forecasts more adoption of AI throughout the industry. But it also points to ways that the technology could lead to different kinds of work and open up new possibilities. For example, as AI-generated scenes become commonplace, studios will need technicians who know how to blend real footage with digitally created worlds. And as AI lowers the cost of producing polished films and shows, it could allow more “micro-studios” and independent filmmakers to create professional-quality content.

At the same time, the report also quotes a studio executive who concedes that AI could represent “a more significant platform shift than we have ever seen before in our industry.”

So it’s no wonder my students, along with varied critics, commentators and industry professionals, are nervous.

However, from where I stand, I’m convinced that the industry will weather this radical disruption. It’s adapted to big changes in the past: the addition of sound in the 1920s, the threat posed by videotape in the 1980s and streaming in the 2000s.

In the end, people will always crave new, artfully told stories. While the filmmaking tools and job market may be in transition, that core need for storytelling is not going away.

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Netflix Is Buying Warner Brothers. Is This The End Of The Cinema?

Sinners has become the highest grossing original film at the US box office in years. Warner Bros. Pictures via AP

BY LIAM BURKE

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND CINEMA

AND SCREEN STUDIES DISCIPLINE LEADER,

SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

The world’s dominant streaming service, Netflix, has announced its planned acquisition of Warner Bros with a deal valued at US$82.7 billion (A$124.5 billion).

The acquisition has provoked criticism from film fans, the creative community and the United States government, including concerns for the future of filmgoing. News of the acquisition was also followed by a hostile bid (a bid that goes directly to shareholders, not the board), from Paramount Skydance.

Jane Fonda described the Netflix deal as “catastrophic”, saying it “threatens the entire entertainment industry”.

Since emerging as the global leader in streaming, Netflix has avoided acquisitions while its competitors have bought up legacy assets, like Amazon’s purchase of MGM in 2022. Rather than buy existing intellectual property, Netflix sought to build new brands such as Stranger Things and Squid Game.

However, it is rare that a 100-year archive like Warner Bros – which ranges from Looney Tunes cartoons to Emmy-magnet The White Lotus – would come up for sale. The deal would bolster Netflix’s library and save expensive licensing costs. There’s no need to pay for ten seasons of Friends if you own the company.

The acquisition raises questions on the consolidation of streaming services. But one of the most immediate concerns is the impact on filmgoing.

Do we still go to the cinema?

Cinema attendance has been falling since the rise of global streaming. This decline was exacerbated by the pandemic: 2025’s global box office will be down 13% from pre-COVID times.

Netflix occasionally releases films in a handful of theatres for extremely limited runs to qualify for awards such as the Oscars, which require a cinematic release. But Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has repeatedly stated Netflix’s priority is at home rather than theatres.

While blockbusters from the Warner Bros studio like Batman and Minecraft are likely to still be released in cinemas under the new super-company, original and mid-budget films may not get the same opportunity.

Ironically, the proposed deal is coming at a time when Warner Bros is having a very successful run of auteur-led films in theatres, such as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

Commenting on the deal, Sarandos said Netflix would look to make the time between films being exclusively in cinemas and available at home more “consumer friendly” – meaning the company will look to have short cinema runs and a quick pivot to streaming services.

Theatrical windows have been shrinking. The original Top Gun is often credited with starting the home video revolution when it sold a then-record 2.9 million VHS cassettes in 1987, but that was ten months after it had been a hit in cinemas.

Even in 2010, when the Walt Disney Company sought to shorten the home video release window of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland to 12 weeks, the British theatre chain Odeon threatened not to exhibit the film. Today, blockbusters like Wicked can fly to premium video on demand in a few weeks.

Many theatrical films earn the majority of their box office in the first two weeks of release, and so longer exclusive windows are arguably a case of diminishing returns. However, this doesn’t always hold true.

Earlier this year, Warner Bros’ vampire movie Sinners opened modestly in cinemas. But the film sustained its audience over several weeks on its way to becoming the highest grossing original film at the US box office in years, taking in over US$260 million (A$390 million).

Cinephiles argue original films like Sinners need time to find a cinema audience, and the film’s many musical and horror setpieces are amplified by the communal experience of the theatre.

Challenges ahead

Skydance is also looking to add the studio to its growing portfolio, after its recent purchase of Paramount.

Skydance owner David Ellison has demonstrated his commitment to cinemas by promising Paramount will release 30 films in theatres a year with “healthy traditional windows”.

The deal will also come under regulatory scrutiny due to antitrust concerns. It unites top streamers Netflix and HBO as well as the film studio, removing a significant buyer from the market. Such anti-competitive rationale was used under the Biden administration to successfully block the proposed merger of book publishers Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

One note of optimism is that Netflix has recently demonstrated a willingness to deviate from its founding principles. When the streaming service first launched, it positioned itself in opposition to broadcast and cable television by dropping all episodes of a season at once, not streaming live content or sport, and shunning advertising. Netflix has rolled back these three tenets in recent years in response to the shifting marketplace.

Perhaps the service’s stubborn refusal to embrace filmgoing is another long-held principle it will abandon if audiences are eager.

New research shows young people are craving in-person entertainment, still a novelty for digital natives.

This appetite for experiences has fuelled the recent success in cinemas of A Minecraft Movie, Taylor Swift concert films, and KPop Demon Hunters sing-along – months after it was originally released on Netflix.

If cinema’s reassert themselves as a lively communal space, perhaps this is one experience the newly diversified Netflix will buy a ticket for.

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Jane Fonda, Other Stars, Revive The Committee For The First Amendment – A Group That Emerged When The Anti-Communist Panic Came For Hollywood

Movie stars, led by Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, protest hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. Bettmann/Getty Images

BY KATHY M. NEWMAN

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH,

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Jane Fonda is joining forces with more than 500 celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights to defend free speech.

The membership roll already includes scores of famous actors like Jamie Lee Curtis, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman and Michael Keaton. Successful directors like Spike Lee and Ben Stiller have signed on, along with singer and actress Barbra Streisand and pop star and songwriter Billie Eilish.

Fonda, a star who has championed progressive causes since the 1970s, explained when she announced the group’s new edition on Oct. 1, 2025, that the effort isn’t really new. Instead, it marks the relaunch of the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization her father, actor Henry Fonda, had belonged to.

The original Committee for the First Amendment was formed in October 1947 at a time when the U.S. government worried that there were communists in Hollywood who were putting left-wing propaganda into the movies.

Hearings divided Hollywood

The attack on Hollywood started when a bipartisan congressional committee held a series of highly publicized hearings in 1947 on what it said was the “communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.”

The House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC, invited 23 “friendly” anti-communist witnesses to testify.

Ayn Rand, a Russian-born novelist and screenwriter who hated communism, was one of the witnesses. She testified that the 1944 MGM movie “Song of Russia” showed clean, well-dressed, happy peasants, which she said was a sanitized, propagandized version of life in the USSR.

Another movie that came under suspicion was “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The FBI complained that the 1946 blockbuster, which starred Jimmy Stewart as a broken man who learns the true value of his life, “deliberately maligned the upper classes” with its negative portrayal of Mr. Potter, the town’s richest man.

The HUAC hearings continued for a decade and divided Hollywood. The committee’s interrogators demanded that people turn on each other and “name names.” Due to these hearings, as well as an anti-communist publication called Red Channels, hundreds of screenwriters, directors, producers, actors and musicians were fired or blacklisted for having ties to liberal groups.

Fighting back

The HUAC hearings brought Hollywood stars and the flashbulbs of the nation’s press corps to Capitol Hill. Conservative screen idols like Gary Cooper testified that communism wasn’t “on the level.”

Friendly witnesses, like Rand and Cooper, were allowed to read prepared statements and to speak for as long as they liked. Such courtesies were not granted to the 10 “unfriendly” witnesses – the suspected communists who became known as the “Hollywood 10.”

Screenwriter John Howard Lawson was the first of the Hollywood 10 to testify. Lawson, after refusing to answer if he was a communist or not, was shouted down by Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican who served as HUAC chair. After Lawson was removed from the courtroom, HUAC’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, read detailed evidence of Lawson’s communist affiliations.

Prominent Hollywood liberals understood that these hearings were an attack on free speech, free assembly and other rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Ira Gershwin, the lyricist known for his hit show tunes such as “I Got Rhythm” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” hosted the first gathering of the Committee for the First Amendment at his Beverly Hills mansion. Attendees included Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Gene Kelly.

The committee quickly raised US$13,000 – the equivalent of $188,000 today – and chartered an airplane to Washington. Upon their arrival in the capital, they marched and spoke out in support of the Hollywood 10. Next, they produced a radio broadcast, “Hollywood Fights Back,” as a defense of the rights of Americans to write, produce, act in and see whatever movies they pleased.

The committee released an initial statement with 35 signatories. A few months later, it published a pamphlet with more than 300 additional names supporting the effort.

Purging Hollywood

If you’ve never heard of that committee, or if you only learned about it recently when the new version made headlines, you’re not alone. The group fizzled out almost as quickly as it had mobilized.

Bogart, perhaps its most famous member, soon retracted his support for the Hollywood 10, saying in March 1948 that he regretted his trip to Washington.

“I’m no Communist,” the “Casablanca” star declared in a widely circulated statement.

Two crucial developments kneecapped the committee. First, the HUAC cited the Hollywood 10 for contempt of Congress. They were later tried in court and convicted of that crime. They eventually served prison time.

Also, studio executives drafted new hiring policies for the movie industry. Later known as the “Waldorf declaration” because the meeting took place in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan, the studio heads announced that the Hollywood 10 would be fired and banned from any studio, and that all the studios would agree to fire and ban any known communists.

Over the next decade, hundreds more stars and other key players in the entertainment industry were fired, purged and blacklisted in what became known as the blacklist era.

I’m a professor of English and film studies, and I’m writing a book about progressive films made during those years. The original committee’s members were mainly leftists and liberals whose careers survived the political pressures to root them out of show business.

The Committee for the First Amendment ultimately failed to protect the Hollywood 10 from professional attacks or incarceration, nor did it prevent hundreds of others from being blacklisted.

Bad timing

But I don’t believe that the original Committee for the First Amendment was destined to fail.

The Hollywood 10’s legal strategy, rooted in the First Amendment, reflected the hope that their convictions might be eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

Unluckily, however, Frank Murphy and Wiley Blount Rutledge, two of the court’s most liberal justices, died before the appeal of the first two Hollywood 10 convictions could reach them.

After President Harry Truman replaced them, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals. Most of the Hollywood 10 served prison sentences between 1950 and 1951.

Why bother?

Given that the Committee for the First Amendment failed to protect Hollywood from conservative repression in the 1940s and 1950s, why would anyone revive it?

One reason is that there are parallels between the blacklist era and today.

For example, the Trump administration is trying to get comedians who poke fun at him kicked off the air, as evidenced by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel being temporarily pulled off the air.

Hollywood has also seen a surge in labor organizing. Many members of the new Committee for the First Amendment were on the front lines of the screenwriters and actors strikes of 2023.

Finally, this fight is arguably worth waging. Most Americans see the First Amendment as enshrining valuable rights. An October 2025 Marist poll found that 4 in 5 Americans think the U.S. is restricting First Amendment freedoms too much.

Americans still debate whether or not it was right to fire and blacklist Hollywood’s suspected communists. While many see the HUAC hearings as a travesty, others defend the House committee and the anti-communist fervor that inspired it.

Resilience and silence

Many look at the blacklist era as a time of capitulation by progressives in the face of repression. While there’s some validity to these claims, I’ve found that many progressive filmmakers also banded together, using allegory and other creative techniques to make movies with progressive – sometimes radical – messages.

Take “The Pajama Game,” for example. It’s a musical comedy about labor trouble in a pajama factory. While the film is a sexy, frothy romp, on the one hand, the film also casts Doris Day as Babe, a feisty union steward. In “Racing with the Clock,” workers sing about the pressure they feel to speed up the pace of their labor.

Scenes include workers organizing a slowdown, sabotaging machinery and going on strike. The last word spoken in the film is “solidarity.”

To me, the revival of the Committee for the First Amendment draws attention to the dangers implicit in efforts to muzzle writers, artists and filmmakers.

“Silence the artist, and you silence the most articulate voice the people have,” the actress Katharine Hepburn said in May 1947 in a speech written for her by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10. “Destroy culture and you destroy one of the strongest sources of inspiration from which a people can draw strength to fight for a better life.”

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Japanese Film Noir High And Low Is A Remarkable Example Of Nail-Biting Tension – And Now It’s Inspired Spike Lee

In the first half, the film resembles a chamber-play. Toho

BY KRISTIAN RAMSDEN

PH.D CANDIDATE IN ENGLISH,

CREATIVE WRITING AND FILM,

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

“Wake up y’all. The king is here!”

So proclaims Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s new film, Highest 2 Lowest, where Washington portrays a hip hop mogul, David King, who finds himself the centre of a high-profile kidnapping case.

Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic crime drama High and Low. In that film, Toshiro Mifune plays high powered executive Kingo Gondo, who, on the eve of the most important night of his career, receives a surprising phone call informing him that his son has been kidnapped.

Kurosawa’s film begins as a corporate thriller before transforming into a police procedural as detectives traverse the streets of Yokohama in the hope of solving the crime. At the same time, the film sees the director examining social tensions under the surface of reconstruction-era Japan.

More than just a historical document, the film stands up as a remarkable example in nail-biting tension, 60 years after release.

From America …

Kurosawa’s original film is already derived from an American source, adapted from King’s Ransom (1959), an instalment in a series of police procedural paperbacks collectively titled 87th precinct, from author Ed McBain.

The novel’s prose is streamlined and action oriented. Simple sentences like “The room was full of cigarette smoke” or “The 87th Precinct building was on Grover Avenue” read like blueprints for a screenplay.

McBain was a pseudonym for the screenwriter Evan Hunter, who would adapt many of his own novels, including King’s Ransom, for a short lived TV series of the same name which aired from 1961–62.

The series was a late entry in a trend of procedural TV shows popular in Eisenhower’s America, epitomised by The Naked City (1958–63) and Dragnet (1951–59).

… to Japan

The Japanese studio Toho bought the rights for King’s Ransom for US$5,000 in 1961. Kurosawa must have sensed the opportunity for second chance, having been disappointed in his earlier attempt to make a detective film with 1949’s Stray Dog.

However, believing McBain’s novel “wasn’t particularly well written”, he started to make radical adjustments.

The biggest change Kurosawa makes to the novel is to split it into two distinct sections.

In the first half, Kurosawa takes the majority of McBain’s novel and restricts it to the sleek living room of Gondo’s nouveau riche mansion. Gondo’s luxurious air conditioned home overlooks the sweltering overcrowded shanty towns of Yokohama – yet the curtains are often drawn.

This section resembles a chamber-play. Kurosawa’s masterful blocking of the actors forces the audience’s eyes to shift around the widescreen frame; examining each character’s reaction in real time to every gradual reveal of information.

In the second half, Kurosawa abandons the claustrophobia of Gondo’s living room and sends the investigation into the streets below. Abandoning the plot of the novel, this is when the film’s observations of contemporary Japanese society come to the forefront.

An era of Americanisation

The film comments on the “Americanisation” of Japan that took place in the postwar era. Following the end of American Occupation, Japan entered into an unprecedented period of production, prosperity and profit known as the Economic Miracle.

A huge demand for “Western” cultural and commercial goods reshaped much of private and public life. The “three sacred treasures” of domestic goods during the 1960s would be the colour television, the automobile and the air conditioner. The continued presence of United States Army bases allowed the proliferation of American comic books and magazines, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records.

But for the Japanese, America was both a figure of aspirational culture, and of ongoing military control. During protests in 1960 hundreds of thousands protested against American military expansion. Violent clashes with the police ensued, and one young student was killed. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower cancelled a scheduled visit and Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi was forced to resign.

This split vision of America is almost directly reflected in the dual structure of High and Low. Gondo’s home represents desire; the streets of Yokohama represent violence, and Kurosawa employs the aesthetic of film noir in intensifying the anxiety of the urban environment.

The film was released one year prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which sought to reintroduce Japan onto the world stage, showcasing the country’s remarkable transformation.

Kurosawa presents audiences with the repercussions of such progression, asking us to consider the lives and choices of those who have been left behind.

And back to America again

Kurosawa’s films have proved fertile material for American remakes. Seven Samurai (1954) became The Magnificent Seven (1960 and 2016); Yojimbo (1961) became A Fistful of Dollars (1964); and Last Man Standing (1996) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) were an inspiration behind Star Wars (1977).

High and Low has long been earmarked for an American remake. In 1993, Martin Scorsese tried to get a version off the ground, and in 2008 Scorsese tried to pass directing duties to Mike Nichols. Now finally, Lee’s version has premiered at Cannes and to positive reviews.

Kurosawa’s original film continues to impress over half a decade later.

It is ranked 77 on IMDb’s top 250 films of all time and is number six on a similar list from Letterboxd.

In late 2024, the film received a 4K restoration and, along with numerous other Kurosawa classics, was part of a Kurosawa retrospective across cinemas worldwide.

The film has had a remarkable shelf life. It has transcended not only its low brow source material but also language, culture and history.

If Lee’s remake manages to capture even a small portion of the original, then it’s sure to be a great film.

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Bono: Stories Of Surrender Review: For U2 Fans Only

BY RACHEL WEST

U2 frontman Bono is recounting his life and career in the new concert doc Bono: Stories of Surrender. After unveiling his memoir of the same name in 2022 (and a new truncated paperback version last month), Bono took his “book tour” on the road. As only Bono can, he turned his book tour into a one-man show, performing excerpts from his book and snippets of U2 songs while backed by a quartet. Cameras captured a 2023 New York stop of his touring production to bring the show to audiences around the world, now streaming on Apple TV+.

For many music lovers and even U2 fans, Bono can be a polarizing figure. His swagger and personality can often eclipse the band and the music, even when he’s acting with the best intentions and using his platform to bring awareness to important issues. Here, in Stories of Surrender, his main character energy dominates the screen.

Bono recounts his childhood, including the death of his mother, Iris, at his grandfather’s funeral, the constant vying for his father Bob’s love, and meeting the two loves of his life–wife Ali and his U2 bandmates–in the same week in high school. These stories are quite familiar to any U2 fan. He performs excerpts lifted straight out of the book, often verbatim, which does create a full-blown sensory book reading experience.

As in the stage show, his messy handwriting appears on screen, punctuating his tales. Empty chairs sub in for band members The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton, and his father as he weaves his tales. After all, Bono is first and foremost a showman. He commands the crowd from his pulpit on stage. While that may work in the intimate theatres of his book tour and Las Vegas’ Sphere, it doesn’t quite translate to director Andrew Dominik’s film with the same impact.

Premiering at Cannes, where it received a seven-minute ovation, the beautifully-shot black and white Stories of Surrender is a no-frills production by U2 standards. There is no giant lemon or spaceship stage because Bono doesn’t need that. Focusing on his relationship with his father, his love of classical music, and his formative moments, those seeking tidbits and stories about life on the road with the band, performing from the world’s biggest stages and rubbing elbows with stars will be left disappointed.

As a decades-long U2 fan who has seen the band more times than I can count, the energy and vibrancy of Bono’s live performance of Stories of Surrender is missing in this recorded version. Perhaps to understand and love U2 is to be in the room to see Bono work his magic. It is unlike anything or anyone else performing music today. For fans wishing to recapture some of that live experience, Stories of Surrender feels like a bit of an empty shell. There is just some element missing in this film version. But, with a book tour that only included a single Canadian date in Toronto, this version is the only way for most fans to get to see and hear Bono’s stories in this format.

What is not missing are U2 songs. Reimagined and shortened versions of “Vertigo”, “Beautiful Day”, “I Will Follow”, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and more are peppered throughout the performance. They are used to punctuate his story of surrender. Lyrics from “Desire” mark his relationship with Ali, while “Out of Control” paints a picture of his youth, and U2’s Pavarotti collab “Miss Sarajevo” echoes through his only real celeb tale (complete with an Italian accent).

There is a nice throughline to Anton Corbijn’s excellent 1988 black and white U2 documentary Rattle & Hum through some stylistic choices, and various nods to other stories that Bono has told over the years. It’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already a U2 fan finding connection and entertainment from Stories of Surrender, but those who do will be rewarded and reminded of what exactly makes Bono the frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands.

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Film Review: “A Complete Unknown” — A Fable Well Worth Telling

BY TIM JACKSON

Focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, director James Mangold turns Bob Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold. Screening on screens around New England beginning December 24.

In Bob Dylan’s imaginative memoir, Chronicle, he begins: “I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.” It is an apt summary of James Mangold’s film A Complete Unknown. With a script by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric (Arts Fuse review), the film covers Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in January 1961 and ends with his legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The reinvention of Bobby Zimmerman into Bob Dylan was swift; he took the city and the folk world by storm. Mangold gleans Wald’s book for references and details, painting a clear if occasionally fanciful portrait. Dylan was already an obsessive songwriter at twenty. His songs and lyrics were highly personal, unlike the traditional songs performed by his peers. His performance at Newport with electric instruments was transformative, a radical departure from what was the standard for ‘folk music’, which was resolutely acoustic.

Playing Dylan, Timothée Chalamet might earn his first Oscar. There is a passing physical resemblance between the two of them; but more important, the actor plays the guitar and meets the challenge of duplicating Dylan’s nasal vocal style. (The rest of the cast also perform their musical numbers.) Chalamet suggests that Dylan’s mumbling speech might be the way the man used to emotionally distance himself from the world and close relationships. That reticence is understandable. As Dylan sings in “Maggie’s Farm”, ‘I got a head full of ideas that is drivin’ me insane’.

At age 20, Dylan is seen in the film moving into her apartment with a New York girlfriend, where he writes compulsively. Soon after that, Dylan shacks up with the already famous Joan Baez. (As Baez, Monica Barbaro has an unaffected singing voice that resonates with Baez’s, though the original is a tough act to duplicate.) Initially, Dylan had commented to manager Albert Grossman that Baez was “pretty,” adding “maybe too pretty”. Arrogant, unshakably confident of his own vision, Dylan later tells Baez to her face that: “Your songs are like oil paintings at the dentist’s office.” Baez’s understandable response: “And you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”

The narrative’s accuracy regarding times and places is shakey. It is true that Dylan met and played with the legendary Woody Guthrie during his first week in New York. A Complete Unknown places his initial visit at New Jersey’s Greystone Psychiatric Park where Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy (also in this year’s Nightbitch), lies in bed, unable to speak, his career cut short after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But it is film fiction that Pete Seeger was at Guthrie’s side at the time. Edward Norton’s fatherly demeanor and vocal inflections imitate Seeger perfectly — his performance is among the film’s highlights. After Dylan plays “Song to Woody” in the hospital room, the pair sit without comment. The silence of this moving scene makes a dramatic point: we’re left to infer that both of the older artists recognize that this young minstrel from Duluth might be the pioneer for a new generation of folk artists.

Grossman soon signed Dylan into his stable of artists, which included the biggest stars of the scene, such as Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. A Columbia Record contract followed. Grossman was a music industry powerhouse, but Dan Fogler’s interpretation of him is a bit clownish. Grossman soon recognized that his other artists could cover Dylan’s quickly expanding repertoire, earning all concerned a fortune in royalties.

In the film, Dylan falls into a relationship with activist and artist Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning. This character is a substitute for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s actual muse, the woman who graces the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. (It is one of the few name changes in the film.) In Chronicles, Dylan describes meeting Rotolo: “We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.” He later wrote the song “Ballad in Plain D” about their separation. In 1985 he said ”Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” After recording it, he was never known to have performed it again.

The fine supporting cast includes Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax. Many key figures are skirted over in this telling, such as journalist Bob Shelton and folk singers Phil Ochs and Peter Yarrow. Others, like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, receive peripheral cameos. One notable scene comes when Dylan makes an unexpected appearance at a TV show hosted by Seeger, in which the guest is a mythical Delta Blues singer named Jesse Moffett. The blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield was brought in to play the role. Moffett and Dylan play a wonderful duet; it’s a made-up performance, but it adds some blues bona fides to the film.

Dylan’s wealth and status came fast. By 1964, he was a star. The civil rights and anti-war movements embraced the performer as their premier spokesman-troubadour. But soon a a radically altered Dylan would emerge, one that alienated many of his fans and admirers. That’s the subject of the second half of A Complete Unknown, which leads up to Dylan’s infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

George Wein began the folk festival in 1959 with Grossman. It was to serve as a platform for live performances in the acoustic tradition, the lineup structured to include emerging folk artists (Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio), traditional bluegrass acts (Flatt and Scruggs), aging blues masters (Son House, Odetta, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee), and many more. Wein was creating a community made up of musicians who were dedicated to the progressive ideals of a generation, artists who had come of age amidst the battles against racial segregation and McCarthyism. There was also the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. War was escalating in Vietnam. At the center of the movement and its ideals was the perpetually engaged Pete Seeger. But Dylan was a musician and poet first, not an activist. His sudden fame made him uncomfortable; he resented being labeled or pigeonholed. He had a working knowledge of a vast range of American music and loved rock and roll as much as folk. Given that his songs and lyrics were being interpreted by many as speaking for the conscience of anti-establishment culture, a conflict was inevitable.

In March of 1964, Dylan recorded an electric album, Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan, backed by members of Paul Butterfield’s Chicago Blues band, opened at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric version of “Maggie’s Farm”. Many in the crowd booed: it was seen by some as an affront to the acoustic roots of folk. They shouldn’t have been so surprised. The truth is, Dylan always wanted to be a rock star. Unacknowledged is the fact that the Butterfield Band had performed loudly that same afternoon with electric guitars. But Dylan’s performance ended up creating an angry division between Seeger, the traditionalist, and Dylan, who was upset and confounded by the hostile reaction. The folk world was forever changed.

The performance was not as much a revolution as an evolution, a change that is at the heart of A Complete Unknown. As befits a Hollywood biopic, it fabricates and simplifies details for the sake of creating drama out of Dylan’s break with the past. There’s added soap opera: an awkward episode about a romantic break-up. Nevertheless, by focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, Mangold turns Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

Given that America today is being ripped apart by another traumatic political divide, this is a story worth telling. Particularly for generations only vaguely familiar with the embattled evolution of one of America’s visionary artist poets,

Dylan aficionados will no doubt grumble. Chronologically, songs are performed before they were actually written; there are incidents that never happened, and various events have been consolidated for dramatic purposes. Rolling Stone magazine has published a list of 29 fictitious events and/or details in the film. Purists should turn to numerous books on Dylan’s life and music. Besides Dylan Goes Electric and Chronicles, it is worth looking at 2022’s Philosophy of Modern Song, in which Dylan analyzes and riffs on tunes over the course of over 60 essays. In film, there are Martin Scorsese’s documentaries, 2005’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and 2029’s The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. Also worth taking in: Todd Haynes’s terrific I’m Not There and D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, which covers Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England.

Dylan, who is on record as admiring Chalamet’s performance suggested on X, “After you’ve seen the movie read [Wald’s] book”. The book and film fit together well; they present a complete picture. In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Chalamet explains: “This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.”

Footnote:

I was at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I had just gotten my driver’s license and I drove to Newport from Connecticut with two friends. We slept in sleeping bags in the dirt and washed at the local YMCA. I owned the double side 45 RPM record of “Like a Rolling Stone”. That electric version, along with British adaptations of American standards, such as The Animal’s version of “House on the Rising Sun”, were blowing our young minds. All day, you could attend what were called ‘workshops’ with roots artists from America and around the world. The most vivid of those in my memory: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Doc Watson and his son Merle, Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. In those days you could gather informally around a folk singer like Taj Mahal singing under a tree in the afternoons. I’ll never forget an impromptu performance featuring Peter Schumann, co-founder of the Bread & Puppet Theatre, who did some improvised storytelling while Eric Von Schmidt unrolled a long sheet of paper attached to a fence and drew illustrations as he went along.

That evening, we expected Dylan to “go electric.” We had been soaked by the rain and couldn’t afford the ticket price, so we listened from outside the gates. We were pleased to hear the electric guitars cranking out “Like a Rolling Stone”. A decade later, working with folk singer Tom Rush, I wrote a piece for Black Sheep Magazine called “The Folkie’s Fear of Drums”. A positive letter of response was later published from none other than – Pete Seeger!

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story. And two short films: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.

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Jazz Club Blue Note Opens New Los Angeles Venue And Take Over Hollywood Bowl Festival

Grammy winning artist and composer to curate events in L.A.

BY AUGUST BROWN

LOS ANGELES (LOS ANGELES TIMES) - The acclaimed New York venue Blue Note Jazz Club is going to sweep through L.A.’s music scene in 2025.

The Greenwich Village club — long regarded as one of New York’s elite spaces for jazz — will open a new venue in Hollywood in March, with 200- and 100-capacity performance rooms and a full restaurant. The club already has outposts around the world, including Napa, Hawaii, Tokyo, Italy, China and Brazil.

The venue will again partner with Grammy-winning artist and composer Robert Glasper to curate events in L.A., building on his long-running “Robtober” artist residency.

“I’m honored to partner up with Blue Note once again for what will be a significant cultural intersection for the Los Angeles community. Los Angeles has always been a second home to me, and I can’t wait to bring L.A. culture to the Blue Note,” Glasper said in a statement.

The venue arrives at a mixed moment for local jazz clubs, as some beloved venues have shuttered and others are revamping to hang on.

Additionally, the venue will become the new flagship partner of the Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival, which will be renamed the Blue Note Jazz Festival (it began as the Playboy Jazz Festival in 1979). Presented by the LA Phil, the revamped festival will debut June 14 at the Hollywood Bowl, with a full lineup announced February 18 and tickets on sale in May.

The Napa edition of the Blue Note Jazz Festival Napa began in 2022, with a mix of hip-hop and R&B that’s hosted headliners Nas, Mary J. Blige, Chance the Rapper and Maxwell.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Blue Note to launch the Blue Note Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl,” LA Phil’s president and chief executive Kim Noltemy said in a statement. “This partnership represents a shared dedication to celebrating jazz and its extraordinary artists while continuing the legacy of world-class music at the Bowl. Together, we look forward to creating an unforgettable experience for jazz lovers in Los Angeles.”

“The Ritual” Tells The Story Of Inglewood Educator Tedric Johnson

Inglewood Educator Tedric Johnson (Los Angeles Standard)

BY JASON LEWIS

LOS ANGELES, CA (LOS ANGELES STANDARD) -- The Spot SoDo Studios has produced a documentary on Inglewood educator Tedric Johnson, who taught Black and Latino boys at Morningside High School who many teachers did not want to deal with. Through the Schools with a Purpose program, Johnson took students who were considered trouble makers, and many of whom were in gangs, and turned them into positive and successful members of society.

“Mr. J took who California deemed as the worst,” said Dominic Banks, owner of The Spot SoDo Studios and a former student of Johnson’s. “I had given up on school. My mindset was more of a hustling mindset, and I didn’t care. The first day that I had walked in Mr. Johnson’s class, that brother gave me the ‘Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ and he told me to read this. I opened up that book and it changed my life. I turned from being the kid that didn’t care to one of the top students in his class. I made sure to be an example of his program to my other peers.”

“Mr. Johnson would call my house if I was not in his class,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Robert Hawkins, who is also the president of the Los Angeles City Stentorians African American firefighters association and a former student of Johnson’s. “If I chose to ditch, he would know, and my mother would know. Because of Mr. Johnson’s influence, I didn’t want to get on his bad side. I looked up to him and respected him. I loved him like a fatherly figure. It meant everything in the world to me for him to be proud of me. He was my role model. He knew how to talk in business meeting but he also knew the gang culture. He knew the big homies from the neighborhood, and he squashed so many beefs in his class.”

Johnson was able to connect with the boys in his class because he had their same background. He went to school in Inglewood. He had a similar upbringing in the same neighborhoods as his students so he could connect with them in ways that other teachers could not.

“I knew the areas in which they came from,” Johnson said. “I could speak the jargon. I could relate to them. I was someone who they could connect with. I am them. I matriculated through the Inglewood schools. To see someone who came back to the community, who was once them, who went to college and graduated, participated in sports, that was something that gravitated them to me and I gravitated to them. They were able to see someone on a day to day basis who was able to go through the system within Inglewood and come back and be represented in a positive manner. As African American males, we see many people that we perceive as being role models, but they are not tangible. Athletes, entertainers, politicians. But how many times do you get to interact with that person on a day-to-day basis where they can provide them with quality time and mentoring?

“It was my job to make sure that these individuals were taught from a perspective that they could understand. It was culturally responsive teaching. To incorporate from an Afrocentric perspective. It was my job to tap into their greatness and instill confidence in them so that they could be successful.”

Johnson’s program was created by the Los Angeles County Office of Education in 1991 and it ran until 1997.

“The concept was that it was a school within a school model,” Johnson said. “The concept arose out of the need to help African American males matriculate through high school, middle school, and elementary. The reason why this came about was because the African American male population were being denied a quality education. They were suspended and expelled at a higher rate than any other ethnic group and gender. One of the main principles was to choose African American men to lead these classes. I was fortunate enough to be chosen.”

Johnson believed that it was not the Black males fault that they were not succeeding, but the system and individuals within the system who were not giving them a fair chance.

“Teachers were intimidated by some African American males,” Johnson said. “So any specific reason that they could give to eliminate them from the class — not having a pencil, coming late, not having homework — they used those excuses to get rid of them from their classes. So therefore, if they were not in class, it was difficult for them to learn and to matriculate through the system. If individuals are given the proper tools and the proper environment for success, they will succeed. Success must be presented to all individuals without obstacles.”

Johnson taught the core curriculum of English, math, science, and social studies. Through his class he saw that his students had great improvements in confidence, accountability, respect, and they were getting better grades. Johnson’s mentorship also steered his students away from gangs.

“Ultimately if some of them stayed on the track that they were on, that would lead to either incarceration or an untimely death,” Johnson said. “I preached that on a daily basis.”

Telling Johnson’s story was extremely important to Banks because Johnson changed his life and the lives of many others like him.

“This tells the story of a gentleman who came back to his community in spite of the various gang culture that was going on at that time,” Banks said. “It’s also important because of the teachers. A lot of times teachers are not looked upon or paid financially in the same stipend that we pay athletes or entertainers. We admire those people. But yet there wouldn’t be any athlete, entertainer, or politician, without a teacher. This is a story of the gentleman who enlightened a lot of us. As a society we’re failing our youth. We’re losing kids constantly. We have an influx of gangs and weapons. We need to go back to the core teaching when teachers cared. Teachers pretty much raise our kids. We send our kids to school for eight hours, and if the teacher isn’t right or is going through things, how can our kids listen?”

Many films about inner city Black life show a struggle throughout the story, but this documentary focuses on the change that these students made.

“We watched ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ ‘Menace II Society,’ and the various Black movies that always end the same way; with a mother crying and somebody dead,” Banks said. “Mr. Johnson’s story needed to be told because his program was successful and positive.”

The documentary features one of Johnson’s students who went on to become a scientist.

“That brother is an astrophysicist,” Banks said. “This was a brother that society had thrown away, that wasn’t going to make it. He meets Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Johnson puts him on the road to success. He gives him the confidence that he can be whatever he wants to be. As you see the movie, you will see how Mr. Johnson has touched people so that they can be successful in life and in their community.”

The environment that Johnson created inspired Hawkins to become a firefighter.

“I learned about the medical terms from his class,” Hawkins said. ‘Mandible,’ ‘phalanges,’ ‘occipital.’ He brought people to come and talk to us about opportunities.”

Johnson’s class instilled a confidence in Hawkins that he did not know that he had when he was put back in classes with the rest of the student body.

“When Mr. Johnson mainstreamed me, I still didn’t believe in myself,” Hawkins said. “It was my senior year, and he told me that I had to go. But I was getting on the honor roll for the first time. I trusted him, and when I was mainstreamed, it worked. That’s when I started believing in myself. I could do this on my own as a senior. I graduated early by having over credits by being in his class.”

The title of the film, “The Ritual” comes from rituals that Johnson had in his class. At the end of each class as each student left, Johnson would stand by the door and shake all of their hands. Johnson also used a ritual when his students broke rules.

“We had discipline in the class,” Hawkins said. “If you came late, or was ditching, you got your name on the board. We had this thing called ‘The Ritual.’ We went on the track and you ran miles and then we went into the weight room. You didn’t want your name on the board because that ritual hurt. But everyday we left his class we shook his hand.”

What James Earl Jones Can Teach Us About Activism And Art In Times Of Crisis

James Earl Jones

BY DOMINIC TAYLOR

ACTING CHAIR OF THEATER, SCHOOL 

OF THEATER, FILM AND TELEVISION

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

LOS ANGELES

The death of James Earl Jones has forced me to consider the end of an era.

Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Jones were giants in my industry. They were Black performers whose ascents to stardom occurred in the tumultuous 1960s, when I was an infant. All three were politically active, although each operated in a significantly different way.

In 1967, there were more than 150 riots fueled by racial tensions in U.S. cities. Many Americans worried that the nation would implode over racial conflict, and President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to study the sources of racial turmoil.

At the time, Jones was an actor of growing renown on television and the theatrical stage. He had performed in “Danton’s Death” on Broadway and was featured on NBC’s “Tarzan,” among other projects.

Jones found himself grappling with a question that has roiled many artists, then and now: In troubling times, what is an artist to do?

He didn’t give rousing speeches, as Belafonte did. Nor did he hand-deliver cash to student activists in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, as Poitier had done.

Instead, Jones decided to work on a play about a boxer, “The Great White Hope,” which had been written by Howard Sackler at Arena Stage, a Washington-based theater company in the growing regional theater movement.

Embodying Black power

While cities were burning all over America, why would an actor hoping to make a difference sign on to play a boxer? If they aren’t willing to put their life on the line, shouldn’t they at least work on a play about the Civil Rights Movement, racism or police brutality?

However, “The Great White Hope” wasn’t a simple, sentimental sports drama. Sackler based the play’s protagonist, Jack Jefferson, on boxer Jack Johnson, who became the first Black heavyweight champion in 1908.

African Americans riotously celebrated Johnson, who had captured the title just 45 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In the face of virulent Jim Crow racism, Johnson stood as a man who, if given a fair shot, could beat anyone.

In his book “A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927,” theater historian David Krasner argues that Johnson’s victory was one of the key events that fueled the Harlem Renaissance, the Black intellectual and cultural movement that birthed jazz music, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and the sculptures of Augusta Savage.

The confidence Johnson inspired was contagious: If a Black man could handily beat a white man in a boxing ring, there was no reason Black artists and writers couldn’t fashion groundbreaking works, plumbing their lives and their histories – as Hurston did – to become champions of Black culture.

The play is written in three acts, and it follows Jefferson and his fictional white lover, Eleanor Bachman, from 1908 to 1915. After Jefferson wins the title, the government hounds the couple, in part because of their interracial romance. Officials eventually detain them as they enter Ohio under the Mann Act, a law ostensibly enacted to halt prostitution but often used to intimidate interracial couples. The government tells Jefferson that it will drop the charges if he’s willing to throw a fight to an inferior white boxer.

Jones won a Tony Award for his portrayal of a Black man possessed with talent, confidence and strength, whose biggest problem was that he simply refused to stay in his lane.

A different kind of fighter

Boxer Muhammad Ali was also a big fan of Jones’ performance.

Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 because he was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, refusing to enlist after being drafted. When Ali saw “The Great White Hope,” he felt like he was looking in the mirror.

“You just change the time, date and the details and it’s about me!” Life magazine quoted him saying.

It’s strange to think about how historical events can be distilled into emotions like fear, love, jealousy and righteousness. But James Earl Jones was somehow able to hold a Black boxer who loved a white woman in conversation with someone unable to bring himself to fight in Vietnam.

Jones probably knew that a performance on a stage seen by a few thousand people would do little to end the Vietnam War, racial inequality or police brutality.

But I think Jones was looking to change the culture. He was trying to change the country’s understanding of what it means to fight – and what a freedom fighter is.

Is a fighter someone who knocks out their opponent? Or someone who follows their heart? Is a fighter someone who takes up arms at the behest of their government? Or is a fighter someone who’s willing to risk their livelihood for their values?

Sometimes, activism can be as simple as making art to the best of your abilities – or, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “to use beauty to set the world right.”

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James Earl Jones, Acclaimed Actor And Voice Of Darth Vader, Dies At 93

James Earl Jones arrives before the 84th Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012 in Hollywood section of Los Angeles...(AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File) 

BY MARK KENNEDY

NEW YORK (AP) — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.

The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.

He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of “The Gin Game” having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.

“The need to storytell has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press then. “I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”

Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in “Field of Dreams,” the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit “The Great White Hope,” the writer Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generation” and a South African minister in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”

He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Disney’s “The Lion King” and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the “Great American Documents” audiobook.

“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the pavement in these streets looking for jobs, one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.

Some of his other films include “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Greatest” (with Muhammad Ali), “Conan the Barbarian,” “Three Fugitives” and playing an admiral in three blockbuster Tom Clancy adaptations — “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” In a rare romantic comedy, “Claudine,” Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.

LeVar Burton, who starred alongside Jones in the TV movie “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones,” paid tribute on X, writing, “There will never be another of his particular combination of graces.”

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s “Sunrise At Campobello” and would win his two Tony Awards for “The Great White Hope” (1969) and “Fences” (1987). He also was nominated for “On Golden Pond” (2005) and “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”

As a rising stage and television actor, he performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and in off-Broadway plays.

Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had deserted his wife before the baby’s arrival to pursue life as a boxer and, later, an actor.

When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.

“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “Voices and Silences.” “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”

Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and fellow students with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry, and demanded that Jones read one of his poems aloud in class. He did so faultlessly.

Teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating — acting,” he recalled in his book.

At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and switched to drama, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.

In New York, he moved in with his father and enrolled with the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.

True stardom came suddenly in 1970 with “The Great White Hope.” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, amid the racism of early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones repeated his role in the movie version and was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor.

Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson in the CBS police drama “Paris,” in 1982. (She died in 2016.) They had a son, Flynn Earl, born in 1983.

In 2022, the Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing “Go the Distance,” Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “Make Them Hear You” and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.

“You can’t think of an artist that has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It’s like it seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look up and see that’s tangible.”

Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones nonetheless hoped his art could change minds.

“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”

Despite Its Big Night At The Oscars, ‘Oppenheimer’ Is A Disappointment And A Lost Opportunity

Christopher Nolan

BY NAOKO WAKE

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

With 13 Oscars nominations and seven wins – including best picture – “Oppenheimer” was the star of the 96th Academy Awards.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, which told the story of the making of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, added to its awards season haul that includes five Golden Globes and seven BAFTA awards.

But as a historian whose research has revolved around the survivors of the bombings, I cannot help but be disappointed that, yet again, the dominant narrative of the bombs chugs along.

This narrative has long informed how Hollywood and the U.S. media have addressed nuclear weapons. It paints the bombs’ creation as a morally fraught but necessary project – an extraordinary invention by exceptional minds, a national project that was a matter of life or death for a country mired in a global conflict. To use the bombs was a difficult decision at a challenging time. Yet it’s important to remember that, above all, the bombs saved democracy.

There is something that strikes me as so inward-looking to this narrative – it is so focused on the stress over losing an arms race, on fears of making a mistake, on anxiety over what would happen if bombs were to one day be dropped on the U.S. – that it drowns out what actually did happen after the bombs were detonated.

A barren cultural landscape

When Nolan was pressed over why he chose not to show any images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the victims, he said, “less can be more” – that the subtext of what’s not shown is even more powerful, since it forces audiences to use their imaginations.

But what images from popular culture do audiences even have to pull from?

From the 1950s to the 1980s, many Hollywood films explored the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Only a few depicted mass deaths on the ground – “The Day After” comes to mind – but virtually none showed survivors who looked or sounded like real survivors.

Instead, films such as “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” simply showed mushroom clouds and bird’s-eye views of the bombs from above. When cameras did zoom in on the ground in films such as “Panic in Year Zero!” and “Testament,” they revealed Americans bracing for or panicking about the bomb being dropped on them.

Watching these films, it’s easy to believe that if a nuclear attack had ever occurred, it must have been in a U.S. city.

This genealogy of films also includes collective biopics of a sort, in which a nuclear drama unfolds among scientists, military officials and politicians.

In the 2024 book “Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific,” one chapter describes how Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein reenacted the Trinity test in “Atomic Power,” a 1946 film that celebrates the role of science in U.S. military might. They note that in the film’s outtakes, Einstein seemed unfocused while Oppenheimer appeared stilted.

Clearly, the two scientists were uncomfortable with their newly assigned role as promoters of a mesmerizing, dangerous technology. If “Oppenheimer” expands on this personal discomfort, the film keeps firmly in place the disconnect between the bombs’ creators and the destruction they wrought.

The bombs didn’t discriminate

In the end, films like “Oppenheimer” offer few, if any, new insights about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their repercussions.

More than 200,000 people perished, and the lives lost included not only Japanese civilians but also Koreans who had been in Japan as forced laborers or military conscripts.

In fact, 1 in every 10 people who survived the bomb were Koreans, but the U.S. government has never recognized them as survivors of U.S. military attacks. To this day they struggle to get access to medical treatment for their long-term radiation illness.

Moreover, about 3,000 to 4,000 of those affected by the bombs were Americans of Japanese ancestry, as I have shown in my book about Asian American survivors of the bombings. Most of them were children who were staying with their families, or students who had enrolled in schools in Japan prior to the war because U.S. schools had become increasingly discriminatory to Asian American students.

These non-Japanese survivors – including many U.S.-born citizens – have been known to scholars and activists since at least the 1990s. So it feels surreal to watch a film that depicts the bombs’ effects purely in the context of the U.S. at war against its enemy, Japan. As my work shows, the bombs didn’t discriminate between friend and foe.

It is not that Christopher Nolan ignores the bombs’ power to destroy.

He gestures toward it when he depicts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist played by Cillian Murphy, imagining a nuclear holocaust when giving a celebratory speech to his colleagues after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

But what Oppenheimer sees in this hallucination is the face of a young white woman peeling off – played by Nolan’s daughter, Flora – not those of the Japanese, Korean and Asian American people who actually experienced the bombs. Later in the film, Oppenheimer looks away from the images of Hiroshima’s ground zero when they’re shown to him and his Manhattan Project colleagues.

I wondered, as I watched this scene, whether this decision encourages the audience to look away, too.
Global reverberations

Even if this film is seen purely through the lens of entertainment, Nolan could have chosen to recognize why the bombs are such a galvanizing subject to begin with: They have done much, much more than make white, middle-class Americans feel anxious or guilty.

Their blasts reverberated across the globe, tearing apart not only America’s wartime enemies but also colonized peoples and racial minorities.

Cold War nuclear production disproportionately hurt Native and Indigenous Americans who worked at uranium mines and the residents of the Pacific Islands chosen as the sites of several dozens of U.S. nuclear tests.

For those on the receiving end, the effects of the nuclear explosions are not a thing of the past. They are a daily reality.

And the effects of radiation continue to plague not just humans but the environment. Scientists still don’t know what to do with highly radioactive nuclear waste, whether it’s from nuclear power plants or former nuclear test sites that remain off-limits because they are too contaminated to inhabit.

As global conflicts increase the possibility of nuclear war, it’s certainly important to talk about the ongoing legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But to create a more balanced understanding of nuclear weapons, it would be helpful if talented filmmakers like Nolan made more of an effort to look beyond the narrow immediacy of a mushroom cloud.

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